Published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot,

Hi gurpreetsingh,

The answer is indeed E, and you've analyzed the answer choices well!

To answer your first question, only for relative pronouns (that, which, who, whom, and whose) does proximity to the referent matter. So ambiguity is not an issue here.

As for your second question, a sentence can have any number of commas; "too many commas" would never be reason to eliminate an answer, so let's analyze the answers again:


Published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot, Far from the Maddening Crowd won Hardy immediate success, combining both an architecturally perfect plot with the philosophical overtone that were to set the theme for his later works.


A. Published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot, Far from the Maddening Crowd won Hardy immediate success, combining both an architecturally perfect plot with the philosophical overtone

Idiom: Both A and B. "and" cannot be replaced with any word once you have the word "both".

"that were to set the the theme..."= relative clause referring to "overtone"; but "overtone" is singular, "were" plural.

B. First attributed to George Eliot, Hardy won immediate success upon publishing Far from the Maddening Crowd; in it are combined an architecturally perfect plot with the philosophical overtones

Subject modifier: Hardy (subject) cannot be described by the modifier "attributed to George Eliot." The book, not the author, was attributed.

C. Far from the Maddening Crowd was published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot, and also won Hardy immediate success; it combines an architecturally perfect plot with the philosophical overtone

There are only two occasions on which a comma appears before the word 'and':

1) Independent clause [,and] Independent clause
Ex. I eat steak, and my brother eats fish.

2) A list: a, b [, and] c
I like steak, fish, and chicken.
There is no other way to punctuate a list on the SC. You can and must use the word 'and' only once!

Again, "overtone" is singular, "that were" plural.


D. Published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot, Far from the Maddening Crowd, combing an architecturally perfect plot with the philosophical overtones, won Hardy immediate success

The relative clause, "that were to set the theme," is nowhere near the word "overtones" to which it should refer.


E. Published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot, Far from the Maddening Crowd won Hardy immediate success; it combines an architecturally perfect plot with the philosophical overtones


Correct: "Published..." = subject modifier.
"Far from the Maddening Crowd" = subject (the thing that was published)
Idiom: Both A and B
Relative clause, "that were to set...." correctly placed next to plural referent, "overtones"

this was a fun one.

my strategy to quickly tackle this is to notice that this SC is testing for:

1) intro modifier ... we're modifying a piece of work here, not a person... so elminate B
2) "that were..." at the end (which is NOT underlined) signals a plural form of the subject that this relative clause modifies... so eliminate A, C, D.

This leaves you with (E)... then read (E) again to make sure everything sounds kosher

It was mainly between D and E, but to what does 'it' refer to in E? Can we say with confirmation that it refers to the book because it was in a clause before ';'?

I'll go with E.
Another take away idiom are ->
1. combining both X with A and Y with B, and
2. combining X with A.

Dear Sarai,

Is the following sentence correct?

"Published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot, Far from the Maddening Crowd won Hardy immediate success, combining both an architecturally perfect plot and the philosophical overtone that were to set the theme for his later works"

In above sentence I've corrected idiom error (both A with B) and now that refers to "an architecturally perfect plot and the philosophical overtone" (a plural subject)..

No, combine with is the correct idiom which is missing in your sentence.

Also, I believe That refers to the Overtones and not to both an architecturally perfect plot and the philosophical overtone.

What? There are a few words in the solutions in comments that are not present in the original sentence. What do I make of this?

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